How to Lead a Project Team: The 5 Basics of Success
When leading, running, or managing a project, your success is defined by the experience of three distinct groups. The end-users, or individuals who stand to benefit from the work of the project; the stakeholders, or individuals who have a vested interest in the work being completed; and the project team, the people collaborating to complete the work.
This article focuses on the last group: the project team, and the basics that you as a project manager or project lead need to be successful. The structure I layout is intended for situations where the destination is clear. It positions the project manager as both a leader and a facilitator.
Leading project teams is both an art and a science. Here I’m giving you a starting place to success, not an all-encompassing roadmap. There is space for you to be yourself, to find creativity in how you work, to fill in where needed. Create a solid foundation using what I describe and you’ll be well on your way.
#1: Meetings
When running projects, I prefer 1-week cycles. In a 1-week cycle, the team plans for the week on Monday and completes the agreed-upon work by Friday. They repeat the cycle again the following week with a different set of work. Below I describe a simple structure for running meetings around a 1-week cycle.
Monday planning meetings
Have a 1-hour meeting where you set objectives for the week. The entire team should attend. Your goal is for everyone in attendance to have a sense of what they need to do and why that is important to the overall project for that given week. You also want the team to know who else is doing what so they coordinate efforts. Use these tips to run that meeting effectively:
Prepare by listing out everything that needs to be achieved that week in a centralized location (my earlier article on starting a project has more guidance on this as well as the next section on task management).
Start the meeting by reading through everything that needs to be done (only after of course, you’ve made fun of yourself, or done something else to bring levity to an otherwise sober meeting). Reading through what needs to be done enables people to ask questions about the work at hand to further clarify what you’ve detailed. Allow yourself to experiment here with HOW you read the goals. I leave the rest to you.
Continue by asking the team what’s missing, what can’t be done, and what is important. This pushes the team to reflect on why certain work is prioritized and primes them to assume ownership. Most importantly, asking this question creates space for the team to call out what you can’t see, which will happen, no matter how great you are or how well you plan.
Assign work by asking who will take responsibility for each item. Every item should have a single owner. Contributors are fine to add too, but only one person is responsible for the delivery of a piece of work.
End the meeting by thanking everyone and reminding them to reach out to you and/or each other if they have questions or need help.
It’s pretty straightforward, but simple is not the same as easy.
Wednesday triage meeting
A triage meeting is a 30-minute spontaneously-planned conversation. I didn’t do this for a while and kept meetings pretty focused around an agenda that I would set, but I eventually learned that having structured-unstructured time allows team members to discuss open questions, surface unknowns, or work through problems that affect multiple workstreams. Having this kind of meeting also prevents you from working on something for weeks or months without a team member surfacing their better strategy for approaching it. Amazing, I know, but it happens.
Your job is to facilitate. You want to make sure people are heard and decisions get made. You also make sure the decisions are documented. Use these steps to run the meeting effectively:
Remind everyone before it starts to come with their list of questions, concerns, and ideas.
Start by asking people what their questions and concerns are. Write each one on a whiteboard or other visible place with the speaker’s name next to it.
Take one at a time and ask the team to talk through it. Talk very little and keep your body language and facial expression open and kind. Model active listening. Before you move on to the next topic, ask, to the person that raised the question or concern, is there anything else we need to cover before we move on?
Friday wins and losses meeting
I gave the meeting this title so you can do 2 things: 1) recognize everyone’s hard work 2) call out what we learned that week/ what isn’t working and learn from it so you can run the next week better. This meeting should be 30–60 minutes. This, however, should not be confused with a retrospective, which I will cover later in this article. You can run the meeting as follows:
Go into whatever task management system the team uses and read through what the team agreed to at the start of the week. For each one, ask the team: Did we complete it? If so, mark it complete.
Ask what’s blocking the ones that didn’t move to completion and what you can do to remove the blockers. For example, someone might say: “I didn’t finish the design because my computer crashed and I need about 2 more days to make up for the lost time.” That’s a blocker. Also a bummer. Also not totally clear where they need help. Ask a follow-up question to make sure they get help.
Ask the team: “What worked and what didn’t work this week?” Take notes and probe, considering how you can integrate their input into the following week’s work. After the meeting, make sure you find ways to act on what you heard. When you ask for input, prove that you do something with it, quickly.
Close by thanking everyone on the team for a great week.
#2: Task Management
Lots of software and analog options out there, but I find trello works best. If you didn’t already go through it, read the article I wrote on starting a project. While tracking your tasks is helpful in terms of getting things done, it’s important to make sure you’re aware of the big picture and are heading towards an end goal. That article will help you do that.
Here’s an example of how to set up your trello board. For more explanation on this setup, check out this article.
#3: Updates
Job descriptions or briefs for project management describe communication as essential using phrases like “over communication will be your key to success.” They are right, but best communication, most often expressed through updates, is more specific. It’s most effective to be targeted in how you communicate. Ask yourself this question to achieve more focused messaging: Who needs to know what and why?
You can update your team around progress and issues (which is ultimately what updates are about) in a few different ways: emails, group meetings, one-on-ones, and audio files. I recommend using email because it exists long-term, and it takes the least amount of time for the fewest people.
Below is the structure I’ve found most effective when used as a synthesis of input from team members for a daily or weekly update. Find your personal balance between brevity and comprehensiveness. Ideally, you achieve both. Simultaneously.
Email update structure
Start the email with something emotionally evocative. Maybe it’s a story, a link to a song, or a review of what you’ve been through, and follow that quickly with an outline of what the rest of the email covers. This gives people a sense of what’s important without having to read the whole email. It also sets the tone for what follows.
Pick a structure for the main email content and stick with it. I’ve found themes of work or areas of expertise on the project make great categories.
Here’s a sample structure:
Design:
- A summary of what happened this week.
- A description of what we need to figure out, where we need help, or what needs to happen next week.
Development:
- A summary of what happened this week.
- A description of what we need to figure out, where we need help, or what needs to happen next week.
You get my drift. Keep it simple and predictable and ask the team to contribute to the actual content so it reflects what’s happening in real-time.
Give them a reward for reading it all. Put a song, joke, or gif in the bottom of the email (depending on where you work). This celebrates that they read it AND it also checks if they did. One of the most rewarding things is when someone mentions in the next meeting: “Wow, that corgi gif was the best!” And other people are like: “What gif?” Create FOMO around the update itself and more people will read it, which means more people know what’s going on.
You are already well on your way. And honestly, I’d say if you didn’t do the remaining 2 items, you’d still be leading a project pretty effectively.
But read and do the next two items anyways. There’s an overachiever in you. I know it.
#4: Work containers
The team needs a place to put the materials they use and make. A Google Drive folder, a SharePoint site, a Box folder, a Slack channel. There are many places things can live. These are the work containers.
Your containers also need a story, a thread that connects them. No one tool does everything, nor should it, but they should interact and fit together meaningfully. The story is the frame that contains the different platforms you use, it’s the guide for knowing when to use which system.
Here’s how to figure out your structure and story for your team:
Observe. Notice how your team labels files they share, where they share them, and what format they are in. Notice how your leadership team presents things. Perhaps even observe other teams, ideally in an all-hands or town hall, and see how they communicate. This gives you a starting place. In some organizations, you’ll be lucky enough to uncover pre-existing structures you can use.
Interview and probe. Talk with your teammates one-on-one about structures they have used in the past. You are listening less to take direction and more to understand what is familiar to them. Use this opportunity to also do a card sorting activity, where team members group similar concepts. This will also give you a sense of how they experience different tools and platforms. For example, if someone sees a card that says “Slack”, they might put it together with email, and say, “These are things we use to communicate,” or they might put Slack together with Google Drive, and say, “This is how we share what we are working on.” Neither is right or wrong, but both are informative.
Synthesize your story and structure. Now that you have an understanding of what is familiar for your team and a sense of what behaviors are appreciated, or preexisting, take a pass at creating your story and structure. It can be something like, “hey: we have 3 places we work together: we talk to each other in slack, we store the things we make in Google Drive, and we hold each other accountable using trello.” You might even make a slide explaining this. Then, flesh out the details of your story and structure using an example. Keep it simple and easily repeatable so people remember it.
It takes time for a team to use whatever structure you’ve created, but stay the course. I find it takes 3 weeks before teams really recognize a system exists and up to 6 weeks for a real habit to develop. You know you’re heading in the right direction when someone says “we’re having our normal Monday meeting today, right?”
#5: Retrospectives
You can hold a retrospective after each phase of a project and also at the end. The structure I describe here is what I use during a project.
Keep, start, stop structure
If you’re finishing a phase of a project and will continue to work together as a team, schedule 90 minutes for an in-person retrospective to answer these three questions:
- What should we keep doing?
- What should we start doing?
- What should we stop doing?
Spend about 30 minutes on each (see sample agenda below). It’s most effective to go from positive to critical. If you start on the critical side, it’s really hard for the team to be positive afterwards. Most likely team members will second guess what they formerly recognized as good after hearing others discuss what’s not working, especially if it relates to their work. Instead, start with the positive, or what the team should keep doing.
Sample agenda:
- 10 minutes — Set expectations and guidelines for the session
- 20 minutes — What should we keep doing?
- 20 minutes — What should we start doing?
- 20 minutes — What should we stop doing?
- 10 minutes — Wrap-up and next steps
The remaining 10 minutes are buffer if the session starts late or you need more time to cover one question or another. In most organizations, team members will have more to contribute to the keep and start sections and the stop doing section is reserved for the small group of presently critical and frustrated team members. Be open and friendly while also curious so as to uncover actionable changes during this last section. Your guidelines set at the start of the session will help set this up effectively too.
Where to go from here
These 5 basics are a starting place for leading effective projects. You can use just one section to guide a part of a project or combine part of what I lay out here with other project management methods.
As you work with them, reach out to me. I want to hear how it’s working, what you’ve learned, and what you’d like to learn about next.
At the end of the day, doing great work with other people is our ultimate end goal. Practising the basics gets us there.
Lendy Krantz is a writer, anthropologist, and operations strategist based in Brooklyn. She’s best known for leading large scale transformation efforts at companies like IBM and WeWork through her prowess in project and change management, systems design, and organizational development. Lendy splits her time between her job, writing, yoga, and daydreaming.
